Posts Tagged ‘immigration’

Wildrick Guerrier, 34, has apparently died of cholera in a Haitian jail. Guerrier was among the 27 Haitians deported by the U.S. on January 20 despite the fact that Haiti has a massive ongoing cholera epidemic. He had lived in the United States since he was 16 as a Legal Permanent Resident, and was completing an 18-month criminal sentence when he was transferred to ICE detention and ordered deported in November 2010. (CORRECTION: I should note that it’s not been confirmed that Guerrier had cholera; his symptoms were extreme vomiting and diarrhea. So he could also have died of simple gastrointestinal distress that went untreated in the chaotic conditions of the Haitian jails.)

Advocacy groups have been begging ICE that it’s still too dangerous to deport anyone to Haiti; the U.S. has yet to even respond to their emergency petition. Now we know of at least one casualty of ICE’s insistence on continuing with “business as usual” even if it means deporting people into a country where they are likely to be thrown into a festering, cholera-ridden, overcrowded jail.

About a week ago, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights issued a press release accusing the U.S. of “deportations to a death trap.” Now it seems their accusations were all too well founded:

In December, ICE detained more than 300 Haitians. Many were then transferred to three remote jails in Louisiana – far from their families, attorneys and supporters. Most had served their criminal sentences and, prior to this round-up, had been released from ICE detention. Some have serious medical conditions. Most have U.S. relatives who are legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens who will be hurt by their loss.

The routine practice of the Haitian government is to jail deportees with criminal histories under conditions widely documented as atrocious and inhumane. Prisoners are not fed or provided medical care. Whether or not they have served a criminal sentence, no Haitian should be sent to a cholera-infested jail where they risk death. For its part, Haiti does not need United States to send it more people to feed and shelter.

And at the San Pedro Service Processing Center in California, a guard forced a transgender woman to repeatedly perform oral sex on him while she waited for her attorney in a holding cell. Even after she reported the incident, the staff took so long arranging for evidence collection that she was forced to wait overnight to wash out her mouth.

Violence against LGBT detainees, in particular, is a growing problem, as they are especially vulnerable within the detention system. In addition to being singled out for harassment as a result of their sexual orientation or gender identity, transgender women often face the added risk. They are often housed with male detainees and supervised by male guards. Under those conditions, transgender women are even more susceptible to violence than those held in women-only facilities. …

Unfortunately, efforts to safeguard this particularly vulnerable population have proven distinctly harmful as well. For instance, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) conducted site visits of seven Southwest detention centers last year, they were troubled to find that some facilities attempted to protect LGBT detainees by keeping them in solitary confinement—a harshly punitive measure often used in prisons to discipline disobedient criminal inmates.

The ACLU of Southern California, which has long been involved in litigation over conditions in the Los Angeles County Jail, filed a motion earlier this week in federal court seeking a protective order for inmates who report grievances. The motion alleges a pattern of violent retaliation by prison guards against these inmates, ranging from beatings and stompings to broken bones.

“What the ACLU is characterizing does not occur in men’s central jail,” Whitmore said. “The judge that oversees it toured the jail recently without condemnation.”

Whitmore said “regrettably from time to time there are physical altercations,” but added that every use of force is thoroughly investigated and said the Office of Independent Review, which monitors the department, called the jail system the most transparent in the nation.

The L.A. County jail system is the largest in the nation, with some 20,000 inmates. Men’s Central Jail, which is the facility at issue in the protective order motion, holds about 4,500 men, of which about 80% are pretrial detainees. Last week two inmates committed suicide in the facility.

Meanwhile, DN currently has several stories worth reading about developments in counties’ ability to opt out of Secure Communities. Although there has been some confusion about whether counties can do this, federal officials recently confirmed that it is possible and outlined the process for doing so. Already, California’s San Francisco and Santa Clara counties and Virginia’s Arlington County have voted to do so.

Secure Communities is an ICE initiative to partner with local jails to cross-check arrest data with immigration status, allowing ICE officials to begin deportation proceedings if there is a match. The program has been promoted as a way to identify “truly dangerous people” (those words are from Rep. David Price, D-NC), and ICE hopes to expand it to all of the nation’s county jails by 2013. However, as DN notes,

the vast majority of immigrants deported through Secure Communities committed low-level offenses like trespassing, disorderly conduct and traffic offenses. Others simply face charges and have yet to be convicted.

A few weeks ago, I posted the always-shocking data on the rise of mass incarceration in the United States over the past 30 years. That data, however, is just the most visible way of measuring the rise of the American carceral state. And in turn, dismantling mass incarceration will require more than simply reducing the jail and prison population—which is merely a symptom of a deeper phenomenon.

What I mean is this: Mass incarceration is not just about the number of people actually behind bars. It’s also about a cultural mindset that turns to the criminal justice system—either literally or as a model—as the first response to almost any problem or disruption, even something so minor as a schoolchild’s misbehavior. In his book Governing through Crime(Oxford, 2007), Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon argues that over the past 40 years, our society has reconceptualized virtually every social problem—extreme poverty, educational inequality, mental illness, undocumented migration, etc.—through the lens of crime, creating a culture of fear in which every citizen is defined first and foremost as a victim.

At the same time, this culture also defines certain members of our society as criminals—everywhere they go. As sociologist Victor Rios puts it, in a 2006 article,*

one of the most brutal yet unexamined collateral consequences of punitive criminal justice policies and mass imprisonment is that of the non-criminal justice institution being penetrated and influenced by the detrimental effects of the criminal justice system. Youth of color are hypercriminalized because they encounter criminalization in all the settings they navigate.

Rios found, in his interviews with black and Latino teenage boys in the San Francisco Bay Area, that many experienced their daily lives almost as if they were in jail — so pervasive has become the criminal justice system’s reach into schools, community centers, and even families. He gives the example of “Jr.”: Read the rest of this entry »

The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has handed Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., an ultimatum: Cooperate with the division’s ongoing investigation into his office’s treatment of immigrants, or face a federal lawsuit. Sheriff Arpaio has previously announced his refusal to cooperate in the investigation, and his office has denied the DOJ access to its facilities, personnel, and requested documents. Among the practices being investigated, as summarized by the Seattle Times:

Arpaio’s office has conducted 17 sweeps in which deputies and “posse” volunteers, focusing on heavily Latino neighborhoods, stop people for sometimes minor violations, such as jaywalking, and then check their immigration status. Prisoners are fed twice a day, sleep in tents with no air conditioning and are issued striped prison uniforms and pink underwear and socks.

MCSO’s refusal to cooperate fully with the Division’s investigation makes it an extreme outlier when compared with other recipients of federal financial assistance… Although we would prefer voluntary compliance in this case as well, we will not hesitate to commence litigation on August 17, 2010…

Sometimes journalists who cover jails, prisons, immigration detention centers, etc. spice up their ledes by making some imagined comparison to hotel amenities. In fairness, their sources who are also fond of the comparison (see, e.g., this post). Anyway, here’s an example from today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

These aren’t features of some swanky new hotel. They are among a host of new amenities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering at two immigration detention facilities in Georgia.

I would really like to see a moratorium on this trope. It’s somewhat offensive and virtually always inaccurate. This article refers to eight private immigration jails run by Corrections Corporation of America that are due to be redesigned. Whatever the new amenities after the renovations, I can pretty much guarantee they will not resemble “swanky new hotels.” Hotels typically aren’t surrounded by concertina wire. And I’ve known some swanky people in my time and they do not typically build their travel itineraries around where they can get bingo and self-serve lemonade.